Out of Season
by EleanorRigbee
Summary: Miracles don't happen twice. Post-The Truth, Scully and Mulder, in hiding, pregnancy scare


She taps her pen inside the clean black lines that make up the calendar's grid

**Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.**

**A/N:** This is my first attempt at X-File fanfiction. These are characters that are practically untouchable to me so the fact that I wrote this feels kind of wrong. Still, it was eating at me ever since I heard there was going to be another movie. That said, this was written prior to the TV adverts and I've been **spoiler free** so, this will probably be completely AU in a few hours. Still, **please don't tell me what I got wrong in a Post-The Truth world if you have seen the movie.** Um, that was kinda chatty. **MSR, Post-The Truth**.

-

She taps her pen inside the clean black lines that make up one box of the calendar's grid. She keeps a rhythm, tight little beats, taptaptap. She counts consecutive numbers without moving her pen.

Three, four, five, six, seven. Her number line extends to twenty-seven. She doubles back, stares down, hard, until the boxes mean less to her than the number. Twenty-seven. She recounts, rehashes, sure to have missed something, some sign, taptaptap.

He knocks on the bathroom door, asks if she's alright with Chinese and she drops the pen in between the pages of her planner. Her face burns, guilt and embarrassed make her skin tight, as though she's been caught red-handed. It's ridiculous. For all his quirks and eccentricities, Fox Mulder still does not possess the ability to see through closed doors.

-

He surveys her throughout dinner, his eyes sharp, doing the long division of her behavior. She half waits for the interrogation to start somewhere between the string beans and the noodle rolls.

"You okay?" He asks, his eyes squinting under the overhead light fixtures that resides over the kitchen counter where they eat. She eats his unguarded pot sticker, thinks the number twenty-seven as though it meant something.

"You forgot to ask for extra soy sauce." She says, tearing the doughy exterior of the pot sticker with the side of her plastic fork. Mulder always preferred the chop sticks, but only if they were the wooden disposable kind that came guaranteed with take out.

"Oh." His lips round out over the vowel, his eyes soften, and she smiles at him in the overpowering light of their kitchen. He smiles back. "Sorry about that."

-

Mulder leaves early the next morning and she is still bemused by his habit of telling her that he'll be Fred Beaumont until at least six, as though she might forget, now. After everything.

Sarah Beaumont is still on mandatory leave from library at center of town, so she eats left over Chinese and reads the paper. Mulder already filled in half the words on the crossword. Two of them are wrong.

At six past noon the number twenty-seven floats through her head—she can't be sure it escaped unaided from beneath her determination not to fixate—but she thinks it's not entirely unfounded.

Miracles have happened before.

-

She walks into town, smiles at the clerk at the drug store. She buys toothpaste and razors (one pack that will be shared between them though the truth is she rarely wears skirts anymore). She picks up a bag of sunflower seeds at the counter, thinks that Mulder should be watching his sodium intake more carefully nowadays. Neither of them are young any more (she doesn't put them back).

The clerk, an old woman who visits the library every Saturday with her granddaughter for read alongs, looks surprised as she rings up her purchases. "You and Fred trying dear?"

"No." she says, as honest as she's been with anyone not Mulder in a long time. But the cheerful pink box in the old woman's hands seems ridiculous (twenty-seven is too small a number in days) and she forces herself to speak. "I'm sorry, I made a mistake." She doesn't wait for the correction to be made on paper. She takes her bags without another word.

-

The house is small. Nothing like the house they shared on assignment in the Falls (sometimes Mulder jokes they've stayed in motel rooms bigger than this house).

It's Fred and Sarah's house, complete with a lone pink flamingo on the lawn and a wind chime on the porch. Fred and Sarah who are moderates and agnostics, quiet but polite (Fred and Sarah are forgettable. They need to be when the time comes when they'll have to disappear and not leave shadows trailing behind).

But inside she likes to think Mulder and Scully are still around, present in the second hand leather sofa and the white down comforter on the bed (most definitely in the guns stashed in the closet, the duffle bags that are prepped to go, always within reach, at the back door).

-

She cleans the kitchen and makes the bed and feels oddly domestic. After three years of living out of motel rooms and borrowed cars, she appreciates the trivial rituals of playing house. ('Is that what we're doing here?' she asked once, in the first weeks, when they both still spent their nights waiting for the flood lights to spill through their windows. 'If you want to.' The solid tenor of his voice forcing pieces of her to settle. It was the same voice she had imagined would sooth their son. The one that would tell him to believe. )

She makes tea and drinks in on the back porch, looks at the sunflowers they planted on the perimeters of their land. Their tall yellow heads turned away from the house, searching the sky for sunlight.

-

Mulder comes home early. He looks genuinely surprised by the food in the kitchen. He forgets between meals that she enjoys cooking.

"Find anything out?" she asks, in the same way wives inquire after busy work days, but Mulder shakes his head, negative, and their truth remains as illusive as ever.

"What you do today? Y'know, besides channel Donna Reed?"

She glares at him and tells him he can make his own dinner from now on. He gets up and kisses her. Because he can. Because he wants to. He presses his mouth against hers and kisses her despite the fact that it must taste of masticated cow.

It reminds her of the beginning, of the countless motel rooms she always bothered to learn the names of. She remembers the causal touches and chaste kisses in the doorways of individual rooms. Schoolyard affection, Mulder called it with his wounded smile.

And later, after the end, at the beginning of this, shared beds and Mulder's chest beneath her hand, rising and falling, his nose pressed in her hair. She had touched his face with tired nostalgia.

Here, now, he grins, smug, pleased with his tactics, and for a moment, she wants to tell him everything she remembers about William. She does not want to forget.

-

Mulder sleeps pressed close. She feels small.

His arm is heavy around her abdomen, and she shifts, presses her own hand into the softness that never fully went away (still mapped by tiny white lines, a testament to the child she carried beneath her beating heart).

There, in the dark, she allows herself to note that William will be five soon. She allows herself to think that he must talk and walk and know his colors. (Twenty-seven taps of her pen). She wonders if he can count.

-

She dreams of a little boy with downy brown hair. She sees Mulder in the distinctive slope of his nose. He weaves his way through the sunflowers in the yard, his hands reaching high overhead. He laughs—but it's the drowsy laugh of a baby full of warmth and milk, takes her back to a nursery and lullabies—looks over at her with Melissa's eyes. "Mommy!" he calls and she walks towards him, this little boy that might be hers to keep.

-

Mulder sleeps in the next morning—he reminds her of a baby, thoughtlessly sprawled across the mattress, filling all vacant space—and she rises without him. There's a twinge in her abdomen, muscles constricting, protesting motion as makes her way towards the bathroom to shower.

She tempers the water, tests it against the back of her hand. The room is humid as she begins to undress. It catches her eye, the smear of rusty brown on her panties (it reminds her of soy sauce bleeding through napkins).

It smells warm, metallic in the enclosed space and she pushes the window open to ventilate the area. The smell seems to permeate her skin. She feels dirty.

He knocks on the bathroom door and she startles, feels her face burn (guilt and embarrassment, as though she's been caught with damning evidence). "Scully?"

She looks up at her name (he never calls her Dana, but he rarely calls her Scully anymore either—he's never called her Sarah to her face—she thinks he's afraid to slip).

"I'll be right out." She says, calm, smooth, efficient.

"I'll make breakfast." He supplies through the wooden door, his voice muffled. He sounds warped by the steam that encases her.

She can't hear him retreat, but she knows he does. She showers, scrubs and rinses until her skin is rosy. She chides herself to keep better track of the days.

She gets out, she dries herself thoroughly. She dresses, throws her spoiled underwear away.

Miracles don't happen twice.

-

End


End file.
